How to make application UTF-8? Is it enough to use wstring?
Thanks.

Sadly, UTF-8 is not as simple as that. Look for a library that manages UNICODE characters. (If your using C++ you could try the QT library

Hi,

Can I use unicode with xlib?

I actually don't know if I really need unicode, but judging on the things I recently read, I suppose this is the way to do what I want to. And it's to draw cyrillic text on a window that I'v created. For Latin I use XDrawString. Sadly, it can't draw cyrillic text or at least I don't know how to make my program do it.

Can anyone help me?

I will be quite grateful for any help.

Thanks in advance

Ivailo

Hello,

Yes, this is something that I would be very, very interested in knowing. The area of apps I am looking to be programming in the future in (music sequencing, music typesetting) it would be very beneficial to use Unicode since it has musical glyphs and more that would be beneficial for output.

As I said I use Qt which does all the fiddly bits for me. However, briefly this is what you would need to do.
UTF-8 is a format which is used to store the characters and it will take between 1-4 bytes to represent a single character.
So when you read the data in you need to convert it from UTF-8 to UNICODE (strictly speaking it's UCS - universal character set), likewise when you save the data you need to convert from UCS to UTF-8.
Essentially the wchar_t is used to hold UCS characters. So you program should use wchar_t throughout and then the only difficulty arises when you come to IO. The basic steps are to set the locale, which gets messy (which is why I use libraries) when your text is using multiple locales.
Having said that glibc provides UNICODE support and once you have navigated the maze of wchar functions will enable you to write UNICODE applications.

Sorry for bring alive a relatively old thread, but I would like to know: how would a program display these Unicode characters (wchar_t-s) after converting them from UTF-8? Would XDrawString cut it, or would the individual characters in the individual fonts need to be copied into a pixmap, then posted to the screen (or a similar method)?

Hi -

Yes, Xlib has supported Unicode for well over a decade now (since X11R5, I recall). And no, you don't need to try rendering your own bitmaps - XDraw* will do the job for you.

Having said that, however, you're probably much better off using a higher level toolkit (like "Qt" or "GTK+" ... or even Java Swing!) and let *it* manage the hoary details for you.

Here are a couple of links:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/in...output.en.html
http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ai...gtk/index.html

'Hope that helps .. PSM